Harder We Fade (18 page)

I worked mostly from home for the last couple of months of my pregnancy, when I was really starting to show. It wasn’t that I was trying to hide it from anyone, but rather, Max didn’t want the baby around all the hustle and bustle of a movie set because, as he put it, “It can be stressful.”

“So you don’t want the baby stressed.”

“Right.”

“What about me?” I said, feigning being upset, but Max saw right through me and knew I was being playful.

“You,” he said, “make enough money to handle the stress. Plus, you need to rest up because when we’re finished shooting and after the baby comes, I’m taking you on the most amazing honeymoon you could imagine.” And with those words he kissed me and left for work for the day.

I thought he was being a bit dramatic about the whole thing, but I can’t deny there were days when I looked forward to staying home and having the whole place to myself. It was kind of nice, too, when I’d see Max after a long day of being away from him.

Monica and Loralei organized my only baby shower, and it was just the three of us. And it was perfect. I had really grown close to them over the last several months. It was nice to have real girlfriends again.

At our little shower, Monica asked how long I was going to keep it from my parents.

“I’ll tell them after it happens,” I said. “I don’t want to deal with all of that while I’m pregnant.”

“Plus,” Loralei added, “maybe they’ll be so happy to be grandparents they’ll just let it go.”

“Doubtful,” I said, folding up a jumper Monica had given me for the baby. “Plus, I hate the idea of using the baby as a buffer in my relationship with them.”

“Oh, sorry,” Loralei said.

“It’s fine.”

The subject quickly turned to other things, and we sat on Monica’s deck, eating cake and enjoying a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Max came home from shooting the film one evening and said Anthony and Carl had been giving him a hard time about not having a bachelor party.

“So have one,” I said. I was sitting just outside the den on the patio. I had my iPad with me and I was out there watching episodes of Dexter online. I had paused the show and was watching Max at the bar, as he made a White Russian, and he looked up at me when I said it.

“What?” I said.

“You’re encouraging me to have a bachelor party. You do know what goes on at bachelor parties, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Drinking, strippers…”

He walked over and sat down next to me. “And you’re okay with that.”

I shrugged. “Sure. It’s not like you’re going to fuck them. Plus, maybe they’ll get you all worked up and you can come home and fuck me.”

Max swallowed the sip of his drink and let out a little laugh. “I don’t need strippers to prime me in order to fuck you, Olivia.”

“What if I said you could bring one home and we could have a threesome with her?”

Without hesitating, he said, “I’d say you were asking me a trick question. Good try.”

“Good
answer
,” I said, moving over to his chair and cuddling up next to him.

Max’s mother called me late one morning and said she needed to talk.

I resented being put in this position, and certainly didn’t need the pressure.

“Paula, just like I said last time, I can’t keep anything you say from Max.”

“I know, honey,” she said. She’d never called me that, and I wondered if it was an honest outpouring of affection or if she was trying to get on my good side before she broke some even worse news than what she’d told me before.

“Maybe it’s not a good idea at all,” I said.

“I really need to talk. Are you home?”

“Yes.”

“I’m in the driveway.”

Shit!

So much for keeping the pregnancy from her. I ran through all my alternatives, and none of them were good.

I suppose I could have been firm and told her that it wasn’t a good idea for her to be at the house until she talked to Max, but I would still need to do that face to face. Telling her over the phone or through the intercom speaker at the front door would have raised all kinds of new weirdness.

I could have called Max and asked him what he thought I should do, but he was busy, deep into the shooting of the movie, and there was no way I was going to add this to his to-do list.

“You’re here?” I asked, for no other reason than to stall for time.

“Yes, can I please come in? Or could we talk on the front porch, at least? This is really important. I took a chance just stopping by. I wasn’t even sure you were home but I see your car. Why are you home, anyway?”

This was my chance to get out of revealing the fact that I was pregnant, and somehow — pure luck, I suppose — the answer came to me.

“I sprained my ankle.”

“Oh, no. Is it bad?”

“Yeah,” I said, making my way to the front door, unlocking it and heading quickly to the kitchen. As quietly as I could, I put a bunch of ice cubes in a plastic bag, wrapped it in a towel, then made my way to the couch. I reclined, putting my leg up, with the towel-covered bag of ice draped over it. Then I bunched up a blanket, put it over my belly, then added a throw pillow for more bulk, and rested my hand on it. It must have looked ridiculous, but it was the only thing I could come up with on the spot.

“Do you need anything?” she asked.

I sighed. “Just come on in. The door’s unlocked.”

Then I remembered the wedding ring, and slipped it off, placing it under a pile of scripts on the coffee table.

“You leave your door unlocked when Max isn’t here?”

“No, I just unlocked it for you and had to get back to the couch.”

A couple of minutes later, she was standing in front of me, eyeing my wrapped ankle and insisting that I let her make me lunch.

“It’s fine, really,” I said. I hated being deceptive with her, but I really had no choice. I couldn’t go behind Max’s back and let his mother know that she was about to be a grandmother. That was up to Max, on his terms, on his own timing.

It was uncomfortable seeing her again, and I know she felt the same way toward me. I wanted this to be over with as quickly as possible, so I told her I was waiting on an important phone call and that I’d probably be tied up for the better part of an hour once the call came in.

“Okay,” she said, “I understand. I know you two are very busy. Max is probably lost without you on the set.”

“I’m sure he’s fine.”

She fidgeted for a moment, then said directly: “I told Max’s father I couldn’t speak with him anymore.”

Now, that I was not expecting. I had been sure she was going to try to get me to talk to Max, soften him up, and help her get him to understand. But this was a much welcome turn of events.

I almost moved enough to dislodge the blanket and pillow covering my baby bump, but I managed to control myself. “Really,” I said flatly, almost shocked.

She nodded. “I think what happened was…” She began to tear up, but I couldn’t move toward her to comfort her. “Sorry,” she said, regaining her composure. “I think I wanted normalcy in my life again, and for a long time that’s what he was for me. But that longing for nostalgia wore off. It’s actually been several weeks. It was just now that I decided to eat crow and come over here.”

“You don’t have to be ashamed, Paula. I’m just glad you came over and told me. You should talk to Max as soon as possible.” I was thinking it would be great for the two of them to smooth things over, but also I was thinking about my pregnancy and the fact that all of this secrecy was getting ridiculous. “Call him, please?”

“Will you let him know I’m calling, and why? I doubt he’ll answer his phone.”

“He’ll answer your call,” I said. “He always would have and always will.”

Max got home around midnight later that night, after seeing Paula. I was sitting in the den watching a documentary about earthquakes when he walked in.

“I can’t believe I haven’t experienced one since I moved here,” I said.

Max collapsed on the couch next to me. “You have.”

“That was a tiny one. You said so yourself.”

He was talking about a minor quake that happened one afternoon when we were leaving The Ivy, a restaurant in Beverly Hills. The ground didn’t quite shake, it was more like a quick vibration, and I initially thought it was construction related.

“Trust me,” Max was saying as I turned off the TV, “you don’t want to feel a big one.” And as soon as he said it, his eyebrows rose. “Or…do you?” He leaned over and kissed me on the lips.

“Later,” I said. “You’re not getting any action until you tell me how it went.”

And so he told me that after his mother called, they agreed to meet at a restaurant not far from her house. Max suggested it, thinking that it might be better to meet in public to keep the emotions in check.

Paula told him everything right off the bat, including the explanation that she had shared with me. He said the conversation about his father was short. They didn’t dwell on it. Paula wanted to know everything that Max had been up to while they weren’t speaking, and told him even though it was a relatively short time, she felt like she hadn’t spoken with him in years.

Max brought her up to speed on the movie, and all things related to his professional life.

Luckily for him, I had reminded him to take off his wedding band before seeing Paula. So he didn’t reveal the fact that he was married.

“I didn’t ask her anything about my father,” he said. “I don’t care and I don’t want to know. And most of all, I don’t want him to ever have anything to do with our children. I won’t let that happen.”

There was an anger in his eyes, but it quickly receded when I placed my hand on his head and combed my fingers through his hair, comforting him.

And he certainly didn’t say anything to Paula about the pregnancy.

“I think we should tell her together,” he said.

“That would be great. I would say give it as much time as you want, but we’re kind of on a schedule here that I can’t control.”

Max smiled. “Good to know you have a normal human gestation period.”

We lay together in silence for a few moments until I said, “Max, how are we going to handle all of this?”

That’s when he told me his plan.

Max and I had decided not to tell my parents over the phone. Instead, we waited until the last week before the due date, and I called and told my parents that I wanted them to come to LA, along with Grace, and that it was important.

My thinking was that it would be better to tell them face to face, and there was no way I was going to travel this close to my due date.

At first they demanded to know why I needed them to come out to LA so urgently, and I reassured them that it wasn’t an emergency, that I was fine, and it was just something I would rather talk to them about in person.

Max offered to send the plane and have them flown out here, but something about that didn’t sit right with me. I feared that my parents would see it as a power-play, especially since I wouldn’t tell them why I wanted them to visit — only that it was good news.

Things had been more than rocky, to say the least, but parents are parents and when a child calls, the good ones run to them. Despite the recent fall-out, I knew my parents were good people and they would come to be by my side.

So they came by commercial flight, and Max and I met them at the airport.

I deliberately wore something that would show off my belly, just for the purpose of making the words easier to say, if I had to say them at all. Which I didn’t, because the second Grace saw me, she happily screamed, “Oh, my God!”

My parents were undoubtedly floored when they saw me, but since Max was there, we ran very little risk of getting into a huge dust-up over my revelation.

Maybe it also had something to do with the fact that the doctors were going to induce labor in two days and there was very little time for them to coordinate an offensive against my life choice. What was done was done, and there was no going back now.

Mom, Dad and I had a sincere heart-to-heart talk that evening before they went to their hotel. They didn’t want to stay at our house, and I hadn’t expected them to anyway.

“I know you guys aren’t happy about this,” I said. “But it’s going to happen, and I want you to be a part of my baby’s life just like you’re part of Grace’s kids’ lives.”

“That’ll mean you come home more often?” Dad asked.

“I’ll work on that,” I said.

Dad looked skeptical. So did Mom.

“I promise I’ll try,” I said.

The three of us group-hugged and I was grateful that I had at least some kind of sign that my family wouldn’t be broken.

Surprisingly, it took a while to get to the topic of marriage, and it was my father who brought it up.

I had rehearsed my answer and explained to them that Max and I were indeed going to get married.

“When?” Mom asked.

“Soon.”

“Here or home?” Dad said.

“Dad, this is my home.”

I of course wore the engagement ring, but both of our wedding rings were in my jewelry box.

Step One of Max’s master plan: complete.

Two days later, as scheduled, I was in the delivery room, knees up in the stirrups, trying to do the breathing exercises while crunching on ice in between contractions.

Although I was nervous, the room itself was calm, mostly due to the nurses and the doctor, who were a rock of stability and comfort for me. And thank God for that, because Max was uncharacteristically a nervous wreck.

True to form, though, he was at his most useful behind the video camera. Taking video of the birth was his idea, and I had no problem with it. At least until it was actually happening and he was telling the nurses to give the camera a glance, telling the doctor he needed to get a better angle on what was happening. It was Max the director, right there in the birthing room.

The nurses and the doctor weren’t thrilled by it, which bothered me. Otherwise, I didn’t care what he did, and actually found it a nice and quite amusing distraction.

After six hours of labor, it finally happened — we had a son, and as we had decided weeks earlier, we named him Gabriel.

Max brought the news out to the waiting room, and a few minutes later, my parents were the first ones to come see me.

It was the first time I had ever seen my father cry. It wasn’t a sobbing cry, and it certainly wasn’t a sad one.

“I thought I would get used to this,” he said, wiping his nose with a handkerchief.

“You cried when Grace had her kids?” I asked.

My mom said, “Like a waterfall.”

Grace came in just then and I said, “Why didn’t you tell me Dad cried when you gave birth?”

She said, “He told me not to.”

And I thought we shared everything. I guess that’s what I get for hiding all of this from her. Karma sucks.

I didn’t press the issue, though. Right now we were sharing enough. My moment in the sun as a new mother.

It was just the four of us there, just like our family used to be, and it was surprisingly comforting, even after all it took to get to that point.

A month later, we were putting Step Two of Max’s master plan into action, at the riverside park in my hometown in Ohio.

When I got out of the limo, I first saw the sixty white folding chairs that had been set up by volunteers from my parents’ church. All of the seats were filled. Most of the people in attendance were friends of mine from high school and college, at least the ones who were still around and could make it. Some of the people were my parents’ friends from church.

The chairs faced the river, which served as the backdrop for the trellis adorned with white lilies.

When I stepped from the limo, all heads turned in my direction.

No one, not even Grace, knew that Max and I were already married. The only people in attendance who knew were Carl, Anthony, Monica and Loralei.

I thought the idea of a phony wedding ceremony was crazy, but Max told me to go with it, that it would make our friends and family happy. “Relax, Liv. We’ll pull this off, Hollywood style,” he had said at one point.

It was a modest wedding, one that my parents and Max’s mother were very happy with. Max and I were simply placating our old-fashioned Midwestern parents.

Grace was my matron of honor, while Krystal, Monica and Loralei served as bridesmaids. Carl was Max’s best man, and his other two groomsmen were Anthony and, strange as it may sound, my father. It was a touching moment for me, having him walk me down the aisle, hand me off to Max, and then take his place.

Even though families usually sit on different sides of the aisle, ours broke from tradition and sat together. This was mostly so our moms could each hold Gabriel during the ceremony.

Our vows were toned down from our real ceremony. Max and I decided that they were the most meaningful part of our actual wedding, and they were too important to include in the fake one.

The kiss, however, was as real as the one at our actual ceremony. When the kiss was over, Max whispered into my ear, “I’d marry you every day of my life if I could.”

Later, at the reception in a small ballroom at a hotel not far from the park, Max pointed out something interesting: “You know, this is the only part of the whole thing that’s genuine.”

We were having our first dance as husband and wife.

“True,” I said. “But the whole thing is genuine to everyone else here.”

“Yeah, almost everyone.”

He was referring to Carl, Anthony, Monica and Loralei, who were standing beside each other as everyone watched us dance.

Carl had a smirk on his face, and Anthony was shaking his head. Loralei and Monica were alternating between laughing between them and tearing up when they looked at us.

I knew them well enough by now to know that they weren’t being critical — they were marveling at this stunt we’d just pulled off. A major production. All written and directed by Max.

Later that night we were on the plane, alone.

My parents were keeping Gabriel for two weeks, and Max’s mother was staying at their house to help out. I made sure Paula had the silver spoon to feed him with.

I was uncertain about the idea at first, but the few days we’d been in Ohio had been so great, I figured it would be good for the in-laws to bond together with their new grandson.

Also, to say I was looking forward to some alone time with Max, with no work to be done, would be an understatement of criminal proportions.

Max, true to his word, had surprised me with an amazing honeymoon. The itinerary included London, Madrid, and Rome.

While I was looking forward to all of it, I did feel the first pangs of…something…I’m not sure what it was. Not guilt. Maybe just concern. As a new mother, I figured I’d have to get used to that feeling as well. Leaving a baby for two weeks wasn’t going to be easy. But I trusted my parents and Paula, of course. And Grace, as well, since I knew she’d probably be over there quite a bit.

I was turning those thoughts over and over in my mind as the flight leveled off at cruising altitude. I knew I needed to let it go. Just enjoy all of this. So I climbed onto Max’s lap.

“I’ll need to see your Mile High membership card, ma’am,” he said.

I leaned into him and kissed him as I laughed.

“I just thought of something,” I said. “Two weddings… Does this mean we’ll need two divorces as well?”

Max knew I was joking, but his answer was as serious as anything he’d ever said to me: “Don’t even think about getting away from me. I’d follow you to the edge of the universe, Liv.”